The present application relates to application integration and more specifically to systems and methods for facilitating interoperability and/or interconnectivity between technologies, such as different types of software applications.
Systems and methods for facilitating interoperability between software applications are particularly important in enterprise environments (involving Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) implementations) where large businesses often use various different applications, including older legacy applications and third-party applications, which must effectively intercommunicate. For example, a large business may employ different Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and other software that must intercommunicate to complete certain tasks.
A business may wish to use a first software application to perform a certain task, but the task may require accessing data or functionality of a second software application. Generally, the first software application may communicate with the second software application via a special translation interface, also called an integration interface, that facilitates translating different types of messages that are employed by the different types of software. When a software application is interfaced with one or more other software applications in a computing environment, the software application is said to be integrated with the other software applications.
To integrate different legacy applications and third-party applications, such as different ERP/CRM applications, which may run on different technology platforms, an Application Integration Architecture (AIA) foundation pack and accompanying adapters may be employed. The included adapters may provide bi-directional and multi-modal synchronous and asynchronous interconnectivity between various applications in an enterprise computing environment.
In certain implementations, it may be unclear how and when various readily available adapters or new adapters should be used to achieve seamless and best performance integration between software applications. Accordingly, solution providers are often hired to build appropriate integration solutions. However, this can be time consuming and costly. Furthermore, the contracted integration solutions may be redundant and may result in different solutions that use different or incompatible approaches, i.e., the contracted solutions may lack implementation consistency. In addition, further changes or updates to business software suites or computing architectures may require additional construction of potentially costly integration solutions.